As part of a research project, I needed to determine which content management system (CMS) has the best performance. The contestants were narrowed to the 2 most popular CMS's, Drupal and Joomla!. Versions 5.7 and 6.2 from Drupal as well as Joomla!'s 1.0.15 and 1.5.3 were selected for comparison. Unfortunately, Drupal's 5.7 version could not complete the installation on my web host as it could not lock the tables for exclusive use. As my objective was to determine performance, not ease of installation, Drupal 5.7 was omitted.

Testing out-of-the-box (stock) installations is problematic. Each version is configured differently and each project has it's own vision for what should be a basic stock installation. The purpose of this testing is to consider these factors to determine the speed/performance of the CMS basic installation. As such we'll consider not only raw delivery speed of the web index page but the size of the delivered page as well as the lines of code delivered.

Installing a database server such as MySQL or PostgreSQL is not hard really. Being asked to move a database that already exists, on an OS you're not intimately familiar with, where it's in use on a high-traffic web site, and your knowledge of the database server is limited can be intimidating to say the least. I'm speaking of a PostgreSQL 8.1 running on a MAC OS X X-server in this case. After scrounging the web for several days I found information on the PostgreSQL database server to be less than I had hoped. There is plenty of documentation, user groups, and many hits on the web, but it just doesn't quite tell the whole story on what changes need to be made and it's been difficult to find the specific information needed to make the change. I've located 2 3 methods to accomplish the task of moving the data store (location of the database files). The Backup Method and the Move Method. Hopefully they are self explanatory, but here's a synopsis;

This is a reprint of an article I did in 2006 that still applies today. The original article was posted at http://blog.coiusa.com. 

Open Office is an Open Source suite of applications that can be used as a replacement for Microsoft Office or Corel Office. The advantages and disadvantages follow;

This is a reprint of an article I did in 2006 that still applies today. The article was originally posted at http://blog.coiusa.com. 

What is Open Source Software?

Open Source Software is both a movement and a development paradigm. The concept permits the collaboration of many different programmers in potentially many different geographic locations to contribute to a software package. The programming code (or source code) is made available to the general public or purchaser to allow them to make their own modifications as they see fit. This allows complete or nearly complete software to be customized for specific needs.

Consider the parts that make-up your computer. There are very few moving parts. The fans, the keyboard, the mouse, and CD/DVD drives are the only components besides the hard drive that has moving parts. All of these items can be easily replaced. But the data on the hard drive can't.